Tag Archives: sharepoint 2013; web parts; team sites;

A client came to me with a strange issue. They were trying to edit the home page of their team site, the default page to us techies! They were trying to move web parts from one zone to another on the home page. They were unable to drag and drop the web part or even edit the properties of that web part to change the zone. The option was greyed out. After some digging I came up with this…

In SP2013 When you create a team site, the home page is a wiki page by default. You should be able to move web parts by on pages usually by Editing (Page tab > Edit) then drag/dropping the web parts to where you’d like them to go, or by editing the web part properties and changing the zone there.

The OOTB wiki page does not have web part zones, but instead you can choose a “Text Layout” to arrange your page as desired. So if there are no zones in the wiki page, there won’t be the option to drag and drop the web parts to different zones, and the zone change option will be greyed out in the edit web part menu.

By default, when creating a team site the wiki home page feature is activated. To resolve the issue, I deactivated this feature, went back to the site in question, created a new home page based on a different layout, e.g. blank web part page. And I added some web parts to the pages, saved and checked it in. I then edited the page and was able to drag and drop web parts to move them as well as to edit the properties of the web part and change the zone there. All sorted, so might make a mental note to change the default page from a wiki page to a web part page before customizing with a new team site.